Sympathy Is Not What Creates Policy

But I think Mead is badly mischaracterizing the realist position with respect to Israel. Indeed, I think Mead does realists a disservice by suggesting that they’re confused by America’s support for Israel when most realists themselves support an alliance with Israel. They just do not support the way the relationship is currently configured. Surely Mead is not suggesting that America’s current policy status quo is the only possible “pro-Israel” policy the U.S. could formulate? ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete is responding to this Mead post. Of course Mead mischaracterizes the position of realists. When the alternative explanations he has for realist views are stupidity or prejudice (all the while claiming that he would not presume to inquire into anyone’s motives), there is a good chance that there might be some mischaracterization going on. Since Mead never names any of the realists he is attacking, we shouldn’t assume that he’s arguing against views that any realist actually holds. Indeed, the position he wastes his time “refuting” is held by no one of consequence.

At one point, Mead writes:

American politicians vote for pro-Israel policies because that is what voters want them to do.

Does Mead really believe that this is how U.S. foreign policy is made? Mead emphasizes that Americans have sympathized with Israelis more than with their enemies for sixty years, which I have already pointed out does not necessarily mean very much about what they think U.S. policy should be. They might very well have sympathized more with the Bosnians than the Serbs during the 1990s, because government and the media told the public an extremely simplified, moralizing story in which the former were simply democrats and victims and the latter were authoritarians and villains, but that doesn’t mean that most Americans must have also wanted the U.S. to take the Bosnian side.

Despite what Mead says, the U.S.-Israel relationship was nowhere near as close for the first twenty years of Israel’s statehood as it is today. If Mead’s explanation were correct, fairly consistent sympathy for Israel over its enemies ought to have always translated into consistently pro-Israel policies of the sort we have now, but the story over the last sixty years has been rather different. Indeed, until the 1970s the relationship was quite different and much less close than it has been since then. As Gallup’s numbers showed, a majority of the American public did not always have the pro-Israel sympathies that Mead assumes have always been driving U.S. Israel policy.

We might as well claim that Washington’s pro-Nationalist stance in China was the natural result of the public’s hostility to communism, and we might then pretend that the tilt towards Beijing and away from Taipei was also the result of a change in public opinion in favor of the communists, but this would be nonsense. Even after 1991, Americans had no great interest in Iraq, but Washington remained obsessed with it, and after over a decade of sanctions, the air war during the ’90s and a steady diet of propaganda most of the public was perfectly willing to back whatever action against Iraq Washington proposed to them. Congress didn’t pass the Iraq Liberation Act because voters were demanding it. On the contrary, the public had been conditioned for years by the government’s hostile attitude and negative media coverage to accept the idea that Iraq was a serious threat and to accept the idea of regime change in Iraq. Public sentiment trails and tracks policy far more often than policy is driven by public sentiment.

Washington makes policy decisions based on a number of factors, one of which is the political pressure that advocacy groups and activists can bring to bear, but it is not normally making foreign policy based on “what voters want them to do.” Washington has not expanded NATO twice because this was what voters wanted. Washington did not negotiate a nuclear technology exchange deal with India because this was what voters wanted. Our government certainly did not make alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia because of strong pro-Egyptian and pro-Saudi sentiment at home! Perhaps a relative handful of voters care deeply about these issues, but except in a small number of districts this has no effect on members of Congress. Right or wrong, these decisions were the products of a mix of industry and foreign lobbying, perceived state interests, some measure of ideology and the absence of strong countervailing political forces. There may not necessarily be anything wrong with this, but it is a far cry from a majority of the public wanting something done and having it enacted as policy. Self-interested members of Congress aren’t going to go out on a limb with strong opposition to a policy unless there are incentives that make it worth their while to anger the interest groups that have a stake in that policy. When all of the pressure and activism are on one side of an issue, most members are not going to cause trouble for themselves by voting against the activists’ preferred legislation.

One could point to any number of policies and alliances that Washington maintains and find that none of them was driven by the wishes of the electorate. Like other areas of policy in which a bipartisan Washington consensus prevails, and like areas of policy that supposedly require a fairly significant amount of specialized knowledge, foreign policy is among the most insulated from “what the voters want.” This is partly because administrations of both parties try to maintain continuity in policy regardless of what their party bases want, and this is partly because most voters are not going to be informed and interested enough to bring pressure on the government to make policy one way or another. This means that the public is largely going to accept the foreign policy it is given, and this foreign policy will be shaped to a significant degree by very active, interested and organized advocates who are on one side of a given issue.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 3 comments

3 Responses to Sympathy Is Not What Creates Policy

…the public is largely going to accept the foreign policy it is given, and this foreign policy will be shaped to a significant degree by very active, interested and organized advocates who are on one side of a given issue.

True and true, adding only that the side favored ordinarily must offer abundant sign that it is the winning side and that the policy adopted will aggrandize the instrumentalities of our own state power. Any conflict between them will be settled in favor of the policy that accords most perfectly with number 2.
An illustrative example would be Georgia. Georgia had been given reason to believe it had accomplished number 1. Help was not forthcoming because American policy makers correctly calculated that another military fiasco would radically undermine number 2.

I don’t know why you have sympathy for WRM, Daniel. How this English major became the Kissinger Fellow at CFR is dumbfounding. Talk about lowering academic standards.

Here’s his latest opus. The irrelevant but attempt-at-showing-insider-cred story about his kiss from Arafat (on the crown of head, don’t worry) is indicative of how he discusses the Israel / Palestinian conflict without actually saying anything meaningful. He does promise to actually address your points in the coming days. Can’t wait.

I don’t have any particular sympathy for him. Sometimes I find his arguments interesting, and then there are times when they just seem bizarre. His latest post definitely falls into the second category. It’s impossible to respond to an argument in which he makes one of the most destructive accusations against other people while refusing to provide evidence that the accusation is in any way warranted. Are we supposed to take seriously that there is free-floating, latent anti-Semitism that he cannot demonstrate but which nonetheless explains someone’s policy arguments? I have no idea what to make of it. He peppers the new post with so many “someone has said such-and-such a thing to me,” but won’t disclose the context of the conversation, the person saying it or any corroboration that these anecdotes even took place.